And you thought this whole Web 2.0 thing was a fad. Adobe’s CEO said yesterday that, in five to 10 years, all of its applications, including Photoshop, will be available to use online. Not only that, but that by the time that happens, Adobe said it will have completely shifted its resources from developing desktop applications like we see now to online-only apps. No more multi-gig installs at least.
For my needs, a lot of these Web 2.0 apps serve me perfectly. On a daily basis I use Meebo, Google Docs and Picnik. It makes posting from one of the school’s computer labs, where apps like Photoshop aren’t installed from some reason, so much easier.
EDIT: This seems like a no-brainer for software developers. By shifting their products to be exclusively Online they’ll be able to more effectively restrict piracy and better monetize their content. - Blake
Adobe sees full shift to Web [Reuters]
Comments
Are you basing this post entirely on that Reuters story? I ask because the linked story indicates that such a shift would take NEARER to ten years than to five; that could still be 15 or 20 years.
I hope the reliability of my Internet connection gets better by then…
It was a dumb idea when they called it diskless workstations. It was a dumb idea when they called it network computing. It was a dumb idea when they called it thin client. It’s still a dumb idea now that they’re calling it web 2.0.
what happens when you have a 15 hour flight and are planning on using that time to work on an advertisement on photoshop? Or if you are in a place without the net? Complete loss of desktop applications is a very bad idea.
Great… yet another id/password to have to keep track of!
Even with encryption and other technologies to prevent harvesting of files and other sensitive materials, I see this becoming a bit of a problem using todays current internet standards. In 10 years, we will all have personal hovercraft and travel in elevator tubes like futurama anyhow… bring it on!
As for Adobe, this makes sense… subscription models are more profitable over the long run and provide revenues that can but increase while being guaranteed!
Jon
everything will be web-based in more like 10 months
Not happening.
Here’s the problem - even though you can use a rich app through a platform like flash (in adobe’s case) the code size to replicate all of the features of something like photoshop. Even if you defer loading as much as possible, it’s still going to be horrifically slow - even for those on broadband.
And I don’t see internet getting more than say 10x faster in the next ten years.
That’s not even to mention the fact that for an application like video editing (adobe premiere pro) uploading the video in hd or whatever we’ll be using in 10 years, will still be a huge hurdle.
More likely - we’ll still install something like photoshop, only we’ll pull it from the web and it will transparently update and seemlessly integrate with a web service component.
There might be a lightweight version that runs with no sizeable download.
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